Viliam_Bur comments on Rationality Quotes July 2012 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: RobertLumley 04 July 2012 12:29AM

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Comment author: Viliam_Bur 05 July 2012 06:28:09PM 30 points [-]

From the same page:

if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. [...] And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is

This gives me a new perspective on human insanity, or more positively, on how much relatively low-hanging fruit is out there.

Comment author: faul_sname 03 August 2012 05:58:28PM 1 point [-]

if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.

This seems ridiculously low. That's an average of less than one minute per person worldwide.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 August 2012 08:15:33PM 2 points [-]

Most people don't contribute to Wikipedia.

Comment author: thomblake 03 August 2012 08:21:57PM *  1 point [-]

I think I've spent about a minute contributing to Wikipedia - and I'm one of those rare humans with access to a computer and clean water.

EDIT: Wait, including talk pages... probably several minutes.